Out in 2020…

Paris literary studio 10: Martine Murray

Award-winning children’s author and illustrator Martine Murray was resident at the Keesing Studio with her two year old daughter, and in this interview writes about how that influences the experience.

When were you resident in the Keesing studio? And why did you decide to apply?

I was a resident in 2008. I applied because I could. I was a single mother with a two year old living in the suburbs of Melbourne so the idea of Paris was just exciting and large. It seemed worth making the most of the rather unstable employment that writing is by taking it elsewhere and since I speak a workable French, Paris was a rather appealing elsewhere to be.

What were your first impressions of the studio, and its neighbourhood,and how did that evolve over your residency?

To be honest when I walked into the studio I didn’t swoon. It was a large room with a dark green linoleum floor, a fluorescent light and a single bed–with all the tone, character and proportions of a

Jardin des Plantes

dormitory! However, the neighbourhood was immediately enthralling and I was instantly uplifted. The room became home and I got used to how it was and we went to the flower market and brought some cyclamen to put on the window sill which means I often think of that room whenever I see cyclamen. I also remember meeting an old woman there at the flower market, with whom I spoke for quite a while and who was very elegant and gentle and represented something very likeable about Paris and its culture.

What were you working on when you were there, and did your original vision for it change over the course of your residency?

I was working on a novel, which has changed considerably since and has spent some time on the shelf while I finished other projects, one of which was a novella for a collection of stories based on fairy tales, Tales from the Tower. Because I was in the studio with my two year old daughter, I was always home in the evenings and often looking out the window onto the dance studio across the narrow street. I was madly wanting to run over and join the tango class. This made me feel sort of trapped, as if I was looking on an outside life that belonged to others. So I adapted The Tin Soldier and turned into a tale of a boy with a limp who is trapped in a tower… Later I turned that into a longer novel.

Were you there alone, or with a partner? In either case, what were your favourite things about living in Paris for six months, and your least favourite things?

I wasn’t alone, I was with a two year old, which was like being both very alone and very fused with another. My least favourite thing was having to negotiate a flimsy pusher over cobblestones, down metro steps, through turnstyles and crowds etc. My favourite thing was just… Can I say Paris? I loved the sense of continual discovery that it offered, the layers of life that had been lived there, the museums, the little exchanges, or the smell when you walk into a boulangerie, the custom of kissing, the habit of drinking an aperitif, the little round tables facing the street….

What was it like as a writing/ideas environment?

For me anyplace in which I am a stranger is good because it makes me see the world anew. In some ways it was hard to write in Paris, because I was always wanting to be out in it, rather than at my desk. But at the same time there was so much to experience that I was stimulated and full of ideas.

Tell us about your favourite places in Paris–sites, culture,food.

Jardin du Luxembourg

Having a small child meant I got to know the parks pretty well. The very grand and lovely gardens with their green chairs and sandy floors; Jardin de Luxembourg, Jardin des Plantes, Jardin des Tuileries. Also the smaller ones like the playground out the back of Notre Dame which had a swing and was worth it for the horse chestnuts in spring. And the Square du Temple or the Place des Vosges. Other places: Le Marche des enfants rouges, wandering up the rue Vielle de Temple, a small café called Au petit fer au cheval. And the Palais de Tokyo. Centre George Pompidou. L’Orangerie.. for Monet’s lilies. La Palais des Decouvertes…. We spent time watching the buskers on the bridges and eating apple tartes.

What experiences stand out for you during the residency?

I met a lot of lovely people at the Cité, and because all of them were artists of some sort, often their work too had an impact on me too. Clare Dyson who is a dancer/choreographer from Brisbane made a work that required all of her friends there to stand in front of a camera one by one holding a piece of paper with a word on it that described Paris for them. I don’t know why, but it still moves me every time I see it. Possible because it captures a time and experience of being at the Cité that always has about it both the flavor of Paris and the sense that it and the other artists you meet there, will all be a significant moment in time for you, but not one that continues.

The studio is also next to the Holocaust Museum. On a commemorative day they read out aloud the name of every French Jew who was killed by the holocaust. This list of names is so long that it went all night and I don’t think I slept much through it. It was such a long, steady, sad note, and the relentlessness of it really had an impact on me, as did just the fact of seeing the schools in the Marais

Musee de la Shoah(Holocaust Museum)

district which had plaques citing the names of children who were taken from the schools.

On a lighter note, I do remember my daughter waking up and suggesting we go have a crème brulée for breakfast. And then her always running down our street to the heavy steel gate and climbing up on it so that she could go for a ride when it opened. Since we are now living in a small village in France for a year, I took her back there last week, to the same gate, which as a ten year old, did not offer quite the same joy.

Has the residency had a continuing impact on your work, and if so, in what way?

Yes, I imagine so. It was a very enriching experience. That always has a continuing impact.